Marshall Ramsey

The tourists had left for the night. The sun had gone down. And the Lincoln Memorial sat bathed in brilliant white flood lights.  On its steps sat two familiar figures.  A homeless man walking by looked at the crumpled Dollar in his hand and then back at one of the men sitting in front of him.  “Nah,” he said and threw the rest of his bottle into the trash.

Abe Lincoln and George Washington sat looking down the Mall toward the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol.  Both had concerned looks on their faces.

What was it that you always used to say Abe? “A divided house can’t what?”

“Stand,” Abe Lincoln said.  Washington stood up.  Lincoln laughed and said, “No, no. I meant “A divided house can not stand. Not for you to stand.”  Washington sat down, slightly embarrassed at his “blond” moment.

Lincoln had borrowed a copy of today’s Washington Post from the man sleeping on the bench. It was a hot, muggy summer’s night in D.C., so he didn’t think the homeless man would need it as a blanket.  George Washington did the Sudoku and laughed at Tom Toles’ editorial cartoon. “I miss Herblock,” Lincoln said. Herb Block was the famous, long-time editorial cartoonist for the Post. “But this Toles guy is pretty good, too.”

Both men read about the debt ceiling talks and had a grimace on their faces.  “These guys wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes at Valley Forge,” the father of our Country said with a sigh.  “This country would have had a British accent if they had been in charge. They can’t make the tough decisions.  They are too glued to their talking points. Too worried about 2012.  I bet they would have wondered why they couldn’t use their credit cards to order pizzas for the troops.  No one is willing to make sacrifices. Particularly political ones.”

Lincoln took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow. Wool suits and humidity didn’t mix.  He looked over his shoulder at Robert E. Lee’s old home, Arlington, at all the gravestones.  “Those men and women didn’t die so this great nation would go bankrupt. It seems to me that politics today is more about finding blame than it is solutions.”  Both men were appalled at the debt that had been run up over the past 20 years by the U.S. Government by both parties “For the people, by the people has turned into For the lobbyists, buy the people.” Lincoln growled.  Washington knew his old friend was in one of his moods.  When he got like this, they had to steer WAY clear of the Ford Theater.

Lincoln held up the story about the debt ceiling talks. “They’re talking at each other, not to each other.  I remember when that happened once. In 1861.  That didn’t turn out well.”

Washington patted his old friend’s sweat-soaked back and said, “we can only pray that the same Power that watched over this great country’s creation and during its most trying time will once again guide it through this crisis.”  Lincoln looked out at the Capitol Dome (which was completed during his term in office) and managed a smile.  “Washington sure is pretty at night.”

“Why thank you, Abe.”

“I was talking about the city, you egomaniac.”

Both men laughed when they wanted to cry.

The patrol car sat idling with its headlights stabbing at the inky blackness.

“Car 2, this is dispatch.  Car 2, I repeat, this is dispatch.”

“Roger dispatch, this is Deputy Davis. What’re my orders?”

“Continue to monitor the situation.” the radio crackled.  Strange lights had been seen over the Southern part of town.  Deputy Arthur Davis had been sent to investigate.

“I’ve seen nothin’ so far,” the brave Deputy replied. “No little green men.”

“Awrighty.  Come on back home. Coffee will be ready when you get back.”

The deputy jumped back into his car, pressed in the clutch, threw it into first gear and scratched out of the gravel driveway. Edna’s coffee was worth driving like a bat out of New Jersey.

Of course, aliens did land that warm steamy June 1939 night. Just like they had all through the 1930’s across the South. Except they weren’t little green men. They were little green vines.  Vines that grew up to a foot a day.  Vines whose brains burrowed deep in the ground and resembled roots.  Their arms spread across the landscape, covering barns, power poles, hills and anything else that stood still too long.  Soon whole countrysides were covered in it. They were there to conquer the world. And they started in the Southern United States.

The Roosevelt administration, briefed by the military, was well aware of the invasion. “We can’t panic the public. They’re already stressed out over the whole Depression thing,” the President said. “Tell them it is a vine imported from Japan to stop erosion.”  The military had tried everything — flamethrowers. Bombs. Grenades. Machetes. Nothing stopped the aliens’ advances. The lie was the last attempt to explain the green, leafy assault to an unsuspecting, but gullible public.

So the next time you see “Kudzu” remember that it’s an alien invasion from the planet Kudzurian.

Oh, and Deputy Davis?  He was never heard from again. But his patrol car was found covered in Kudzu in 1964.

Dr. Mary Currier, Mississippi’s excellent State Health Officer was on my radio show yesterday afternoon to chew the fat.  Or at least talk about it.  You see, Mississippi is the fattest state in the nation.  A title we’ve held for seven years in the row.  As one friend said, “We have a dynasty.” (I asked if Dynasty had a buffet.)  It’s a problem caused by many reasons: Cheap & easy fast food, less activity, less availability of healthy food, poverty and a changing culture.  A once active state now sits behind a computer or TV screen most of the day now.  Our ever expanding waistlines are causing problems from diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, lost-time on the job, cancer and as a by-product, slimmer wallets. We’re eating and sitting ourselves to death.

But before the rest of the nation picks on ol’ Mississippi for being fat and dumb — the rest of the nation is getting more obese, too.  She opened the show with a sobering, not-so-little statistic:

The thinnest state today would have been the fattest state 20 years ago.

The Confederate solider statue looked out at the Southern city and just stood there.  He always just stood there.

He saw the tornado hit in 1893.  He saw Yellow Fever kill indiscriminately the next year.  He saw the fire of 1904. He remembered the celebrations after the Germans and the Japanese were defeated.  He laughed at the funny-looking kids who protested the Vietnam war.  Recently, he had noticed more people living in the park around him.  It reminded him of the the Great Depression. And then there were the pigeons. The damn pigeons.  He couldn’t do anything about any of it. He just stood there.

His soul had entered the statue the day he died. It was a few years after the Civil War (or war of Northern Aggression as the tourists liked to call it).  The war. The bloody, noisy affair that saw his brother, father, neighbor and best friend all get killed.  His home had been burned and his family starved, too.  The war.  He gazed out at the courthouse square and watched the tourists file by.  It was 150 years later and he still couldn’t glamorize it.  But they sure did, and that was understandable.  They hadn’t seen the rivers of blood at Shiloh. They didn’t have to eat rats in Vicksburg. They didn’t see Jackson go up in flames. They didn’t see their brother’s head evaporate from a cannonball.

He fought to protect his home.  Not much glamor in that, really. Every father would do the same.  He didn’t go chasing some glamorous lost cause.  Slavery was why many of his neighbors had fought; not him. He knew it was wrong from his reading of the Bible. When General Lee laid down his sword, the solider put his arms down, too. He then walked back home to become a small farmer again. For four years, he tried to protect his wife — and in the end, he failed. When he saw her grave that spring day in 1865, his heart was the first part of him that became stone.

Now he was a sentinel over his former hometown. Stone. Cold. Standing there, quietly as the sun came up and the sun went down.  He watched as technology changed before his fixed eyes.  He remembered the first time a giant iron bird flew over him. And it had been at least 75 years since he had seen a horse.  Another pigeon landed on his head.  “Oh, here it comes,” he thought. He wished someone would invent a way to get rid of pigeons and their spastic colons.

Being a statue wasn’t fun.

He felt the warmth on his side as his cold, gray stone turned pink. It was sunrise.  Another day to stand guard over his home.  Another day to watch the world change without him.